Senate Republicans told North Carolina Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell on Tuesday that she shook public confidence in elections last year when her board settled a lawsuit and changed state absentee ballot rules six weeks before the November election.

GOP lawmakers pressed Brinson Bell for more than two hours, seeking answers on that settlement. Anger from committee Republicans was evident, held in check by some, expressed more freely by others.

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“Why shouldn’t we demand your resignation?" Sen. Carl Ford, R-Rowan, asked as the hearing crossed the two-hour mark.

The settlement came in September in response to lawsuits filed by Marc Elias, the Democratic Party's go-to attorney on election issues. It sought changes to account for the pandemic, and worries of a U.S. Postal Service slowdown.

The settlement was initially backed by all five State Board of Elections members – three Democrats and two Republicans – and it gave the Postal Service six extra days to deliver absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day. It also gave voters a way to mail their ballots without getting a witness signature, allowing them to attest to the ballot's authenticity themselves.

Both changes had been considered and rejected by lawmakers months before, when they passed bipartisan legislation tweaking state election rules because of the pandemic. Republican lawmakers say the settlement changed those laws without permission from the legislature, whose leaders were surprised by the settlement when it was announced.

The elections board's two Republican members resigned when GOP leaders' displeasure became clear, with at least one saying he felt duped by Attorney General Josh Stein's office, which represented the State Board of Elections in the case. The board soon released documents and closed-session minutes of settlement talks, showing robust back and forth in the run-up to the decision.

Brinson Bell maintains that state law allowed the board, which in turn appoints her, to change voting rules and that doing that isn't the same as changing the law.

"I know that we differ on this question," Brinson Bell told lawmakers Tuesday. "The state board was working within the law because they could settle a litigation matter.”

Sen. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, was one of several Republicans in disbelief.

"When you change a rule that changes a law, the law has been changed," said Krawiec. “I just find it amazing that you still believe that you didn’t change a law.”

Senate Rules Chairman Bill Rabon, R-Brunswick, chimed in near the hearing's end, saying that she went beyond changing the law to break it.

"We were totally in the dark," Rabon said, "and that’s improper.”

The settlement absolutely changed the rules for a small percentage of North Carolina voters. PolitiFact reviewed Brinson Bell's repeated assertions that the settlement didn't change state law earlier this month and rated them "mostly false."

The changes ended up affecting relatively few of the 5.5 million votes cast in North Carolina last November. According to the elections board, 2,034 mail-in ballots arrived during the six extra days provided by the settlement – 599 cast by registered Republicans and 581 by Democrats.

Nearly 8,000 voters were potentially affected by the witness signature change because voters were able to "cure" their ballots of an issue by signing a certification. The state board said the percentages of Republicans and Democrats involved here were "nearly equal."

The low numbers aren't the point, Republican lawmakers said Tuesday. And even if they were, one North Carolina race, for chief justice of the state Supreme Court, was decided by 401 votes. Republican Paul Newby beat Democrat Cheri Beasley in that race.

The settlement only extended bad blood in the state over election rules.

Republicans spent much of Gov. Roy Cooper's first term trying to wrest away partisan control of the state board and county boards of election. They passed legislation before Cooper even took office to create a new elections board structure with even appointments from Republicans and Democrats.

Before that, the boards were split 3-2, with whatever party controlled the governor's mansion in the advantage. After multiple bills and multiple lawsuits, that older system is back in place. It remains to be seen whether the Republican legislative majority will try to tinker with it again, but debates over election changes are clearly in the offing this legislative session.

Republicans filed Senate Bill 326 last week, and under it, mail-in ballots would have to be received by Election Day to count. The bill would also move up the deadline to request a mail-in ballot.

Pat Ryan, spokesman for Senate Republican leadership, said there has also been discussion of legislation addressing the settlement issue, but so far, none has been filed.

Update: This legislation, Senate Bill 360, was filed Thursday. It prohibits the state Attorney General's Office from settling lawsuits legislative leadership is party to without signoff from those leaders.

This is not just a Senate issue. House Republicans held a hearing earlier this session during which key lawmakers also pressed Brinson Bell for answers on the settlement.

On Tuesday, senators questioned her not only about the settlement, but about her politics.

Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, an elections committee co-chairman, asked whether she believed trust in elections to be important, whether voters would have more trust if elections were overseen by a fully bipartisan board and about how she got her job.

Daniel also asked, more than half a dozen times, about Brinson Bell's Twitter account, which she deactivated before taking the elections director's job. The insinuation was that she made her opposition to Republicans clear on that account.

Daniel and other Republicans asked her several times whether she'd reactivate the account and release her old tweets. She said she hadn't appeared before the committee to discuss old tweets, and she didn't give a final answer.

Committee members took that as a no.

The committee also tried to nail Brinson Bell down on settlement talk details and her role in them. She said she never had "any interaction with Marc Elias," never discussed the settlement with anyone other than the state board and its attorneys, never discussed the settlement with the Governor's Office and wasn't "in discussions with any of the plaintiffs on the settlement."

She said attorneys negotiated settlement details, and she identified Swain Wood, Stein's general counsel, as the lead negotiator.